Performance: what we don’t (like)
Then there are the things that trouble us, because while Apple is normally THE perfectionist, it feels like it might have dropped the ball a little, especially in comparison to what the competition has.
Let’s start with the design: we’ve already said that it’s lovely, sexy, oozes simplicity, and feels great in your hands.
It does all of that, and yet it’s also insanely slippery, with the metal curved sides falling out of fingers easily, and the flat metal back just as slick when your palms do eventually touch it.
Indeed, the tight grip doesn’t always work here, as the edges are just that slippery, and you’ll find a case is the best way of stopping your phone from falling out of your hand.
This isn’t the square-edged iPhone we’ve seen from Apple for the past four or five years, that’s for sure, and while the smaller size of the iPod Touch was infinitely easier to grip, part of the problem comes not from the jump from 4 to 4.7 inches, but rather from the type of edges Apple has imbued on the iPhone 6, with the iPod Touch edges flat, while the iPhone 6 is more curved.
That change, no matter how simple it was, appears to be one of the things making the iPhone 6 hard to grip. It’s a simple design flaw, but one that will leave your hands stumbling.
Also posing a problem is the balancing act of holding a phone whose control button is at the bottom.
You see, for years Apple has been training iPhone owners to hold the phone in their dominant hand with the thumb sitting on the home button. Part of this reason came from Apple’s belief that the smartphone should be designed for the thumb, and that the screen should be easily accessible by one digit — the thumb — making a touchscreen phone into a one handed device.
That made sense on the iPhone up to the 4, where the screen was stumpy at 3.5 inches in comparison to the elongated 4.5 to 6 inch screens we used today, but even on the slightly increase 4 to 5S, it worked, with the bump to 4 inches providing most of the space with the thumb on small hands, and all of it if you had particularly larger digits.
With this design, the hand could be cupped by the fingers and operated with the thumb. Easy.
On the iPhone 6, it’s a different game altogether.
With a larger screen — longer and wider — the display is not only harder to operate with just a thumb, but holding the handset with the thumb at the bottom of the unit while the handset rests against the fingers makes for a slightly troubling and uncomfortable act of having the bulk of the handset feel like it’s going to fall out of your fingers as it hands over your forefinger.
It’s troubling because the last thing you want to do with your new smartphone is drop it, and yet this handhold feels close to what will happen, almost as if you’re being given a vision of the future.
Apple even suggests its thumb driven logic is still one that can work by including “Reachability,” a creative take on the home button which asks for a light double tap — not a full press, just two quick subsequent touches — which drags the top of the screen to the middle, allowing you to operate the larger display from within your thumb’s reach.
This is an interesting inclusion, but a far better way of using the iPhone 6 is to hold the phone in one hand with your thumb at the side, operating the handset with your other hand.
We’re also a little stumped by the inclusion of Near-Field Communication, or rather the disabling of it.
We love NFC. We couldn’t be happier with the technology, and see it as a great way to get devices paired.
Hate linking up Bluetooth headphones? Bump em, and NFC will initiate the process for you.
Want to send photos from a smart camera to a smartphone in a jiffy? Bump the two together and start the process, connecting phone to camera and making the transfer quick and speedy.
So far, Near-Field Communication has made technology easier for us and regular consumers, and with the contactless tech now gracing payment terminals, printers, computers, and door locks, we see it as beneficial for the average regular Joe.
But Apple has other plans. Even though NFC graces the iPhone 6, you can’t actually use it, with no support for anything other than Apple’s payment solution, aptly named Apple Pay.
In Australia, we haven’t seen anything with that yet, and we’ve yet to hear if any banks or shops are testing it, but it is a little disheartening to see that even though Near-Field exists in the iPhone 6, you can’t use it at all, unless you want to pay with a yet-to-be-seen payment system.
There are also the little things which will get you down, especially if you think that Apple is cutting edge.
Things like a lack of infrared, stopping you from using the iPhone as a remote control, because while the app for Apple TV has been around for a while, you have to own an Apple TV to begin with, while devices like the Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8, and LG G3 all support remote control functionality for most TVs built into the handset.
Things like a lack of waterproofing, because having a more scratch-resistant screen is great, but so is having a phone that can take a dive in the pool, or survive an encounter with the toilet. We still don’t understand how you drop a phone in the toilet, but there are phones that can now survive this, and given the cost of the iPhone 6, this should be one of them.
Apple has made some cool changes, though, and that Apple logo on the back is now an antenna, which should improve signal, while the construction of the phone also makes it possible for the Apple Pay technology to be used by holding the phone in different directions, or it will when the technology is rolled out in Australia.
But then there’s the battery, and if you sole reason for buying an iPhone 6 was because the battery should be better, well, we’ve got news for you.
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